Survival as a Work of Art: Nellie Wong at Ninety

Timothy Yu

As she marks her 90^th birthday, the poet and activist Nellie Wong has given us a gift: a new collection of poems that bridges the decades of her remarkable career, with work that spans the 1970s to the present. In Nothing Like Freedom, Wong shares with us a lifetime of memories. We hear the stories of How Chuey Goong, the head cook at the Great China Restaurant who was “the grandfather we never had”; of an American-born daughter escorting her mother to a casino and watching the joy of “these immigrant women…laughing, their gold teeth shining”; of a seasoned activist speaking in praise of “Women who build coalitions.”

Yet Wong also reminds us that there is always a battle between memory and forgetting. One of the collection’s opening poems, “When You Have Forgotten,” is an elegy for lost memories, from “the paper dreams beneath the banyan tree” to “your father’s brushstrokes / feathering across the page.” Of course, the poem’s beautiful paradox is that to catalog these faded memories is also to restore them, making the poem an accounting in which memories return through a physical reminder—one that is literally beneath our fingers: “you turned to the abacus and remembered.”

                   The power, and political necessity, of remembering has always been central to Wong’s work. Beginning with her first collection, Dreams in Harrison Railroad Park (1977), Wong has graced us with a new book each decade: The Death of Long Steam Lady in 1986, Stolen Moments in 1997, and Breakfast Lunch Dinner in 2012. From the very beginning, Wong has made clear to her readers that memory in her work is not mere nostalgia for an idealized past, but an active and often painful process of reckoning. In the title poem of Wong’s first collection, the speaker’s mother casts a cold eye on nostalgia, saying of an elderly neighbor: “She thinks she would be happier / back home. / But she has forgotten.” The mother’s own “dreams” look back to times of simply “swallowing soup without pain,” or to hopes of “coloring eggs / for an unborn grandson.” But perhaps most characteristic of all is the speaker’s response: witnessing her mother’s tears, she voices her own dream “of embroidering / new skin.” This striking image responds to loss with a commitment to creation, evoking an art that can create new realities.

                  Nothing Like Freedom offers a resounding affirmation of the power of art, but through a vision that always emphasizes art’s embeddedness in everyday life. In Wong’s work, poetry and life flow naturally into each other. “When I am breathing. I am writing,” Wong writes, and “When I am writing, I am breathing…the writing flows from my fingertips.” Poetry shares in life’s joys as well as in its pains, and so anyone looking to Wong’s poetry solely for verbal beauty (though there is plenty of that) will have their expectations upended. In a pointed response to “an Asian woman who says my poetry gives her a stomachache,” claiming Wong’s poetry “shouts,” Wong responds simply: “Peace does not exist.” In a society still structured by racist, sexist, and homophobic violence, poetry cannot be silent. “I screamed in silence for years,” Wong writes, but now, “my anger moves, a storm into the sunlight.” As Wong has shown throughout her work, there is beauty in anger too. In a contemporary American literary culture that has often shied away from explicit political commitments, one of Wong’s greatest gifts to us has been her unapologetic embrace of poetry as a political act. And while these political commitments may have caused some literary critics to overlook her in the past, I think it’s fair to say that her time has come around again, with younger poets returning to the kind of political engagement that Wong and other women of color pioneered in the 1970s.

                  One of the most notable elements of Nothing Like Freedom is its sensitive, and often wry, exploration of Wong’s perspective as a poetic elder. The speaker of “Old Age” addresses age as a “dear friend” who is nonetheless “not always kind”: “Think you’re a gift, do you?” But after giving the ages of departed family members, the speaker deadpans: “I welcome you, old age / at least you’re talking to me.” “Art,” a poem that echoes Elizabeth Bishop’s classic “One Art” and its assertion that “The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” the speaker declares, “the art of aging takes work and leisure,” embracing the joy of a life spent in action: “Walking the picket line for ample pleasure.”

                  It is poetry itself that offers the most powerful response to the inevitable passage of time, the most profound allegory for the persistence of life. “Not Once,” one of the most moving poems in this collection, is inspired by a photograph of Wong’s parents, who she imagines “Knowing, somehow, that your snapshot / Will remind your children and grandchildren / That you fought to live and work and laugh.” In Wong’s telling, the inner lives of her parents remain inaccessible: “You kept what privacy you had intact.” Instead, what her parents represent is the simplest, yet most powerful, message of all: “survival, your work of art.” Nellie Wong’s Nothing Like Freedom is also a testament to the art of survival, a Chinese American woman’s message to a future world.